Sakai Reviews & Product Details - Page 4

Intuitive and accessible platform, great for professors to post, grade, and comment on assignments, and for students to upload assignments. Easy to access and track grades. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'd like to see a mobile app that would increase mobile functionality. It'd be great for students to be able to post/upload/view grades on an app and for instructors to manage, post, etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Has some features that work good like forums and and discussions. Fairly simple to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not the best looking layout and could use additional mobile functionality. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sakai is good for organizing lots of course materials in one place Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sakai is clunky and has many redundancies that make working in the environment often cumbersome Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to use and customize to fit the needs of any course Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Have had a few issues with customizing weights of grades in Gradebook Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My favorite part would have to be the notifications that were sent directly to my email. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The software felt old and antiquated. It lacked a visual and practical sophistication that would have been expected of a program that has current updates. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Why do I like Sakai?

Sakai is open source, free (no strings), reliable, easy to use, and has an excellent user community. I like it that a vendor isn't telling us what tools we can use, we're not stuck with tools we don't like, nor is one person or a few telling us what we can do. The Sakai user community decides on the direction of the LMS and what tools will be updated and how. Our college heavily uses the Gradebook, Assignments, Tests & Quizzes, Discussion Forms and Lessons (for organizing content). We also provide project sites for all of our advisers. We have over 5,000 credit students; 85% of our credit instructors are using Sakai, about 20% of our courses are online, another 15% are hybrid.

What do I like about the new features in Sakai 11+?

Our college is using Sakai 2.9 and upgrading to Sakai 11.2 soon-I've been one of the Administrators and an online instructor for 4 years. The latest release, Sakai 11+, has been updated with responsive design, is mobile-ready, accessible, has a new Gradebook that works like an Excel spreadsheet, and most of the core tools have been streamlined and updated to be even easier to use, such as Lessons, and Tests & Quizzes.

Create Organized Online/hybrid/supplemental classes:

In my online classes, I can easily import a course where I've added weekly Lessons subpages. If instructors use Lessons, they can create a very organized class for students-students can find all of their weekly materials in one location.

On each weekly Lessons subpage I can display:

YouTube videos or EDpuzzles or PlayPosit videos embedded with questions; display images/diagrams, link to Office Mixes (narrated PowerPoints) and/or documents, and I provide links directly to the weekly discussion, assignment, and/or quiz. I also add links to screencasts I've made to my assignment instructions.

Other Sakai/integrated tools I like to use:

I also provide web conferencing with BigBlueButton (an open source web conferencing tool), provide surveys to get updates from my students on how the class is going, provide blog posts for variety, and allow students to post in the Chat Room for quick questions/answers. I post all of the due dates in the Calendar. At any time, I can make the class grades visible to students in the Gradebook (this is a simple Gradebook setting, that displays weighted grades, and has been updated to also display points or percentages as well).

What do other Sakai instructors use?

Some of our instructors like to use Lessons Student Pages, where students can create their own "project sites" and post videos, images, links to documents, and links to web sites. Other instructors like to create groups-most of the Sakai tools are group aware, including Assignments, Tests & Quizzes, Forums, and our web conferencing tool BigBlueButton, Assignments and now Lessons Student Pages also allow peer review/grading for collaborative assignments. Other instructors like to use Turnitin, the plagiarism checker tool, as well as Turnitin's Grademark tool.

As a Sakai Administrator,:

It's easy to set up classes and projects. We've automated the site creation and instructor/student enrollment between our Colleague registration system and Sakai. We use Active Directory authentication, and Sakai is just one of many systems our students access with the same userid/password. We do have a Sakai vendor and a vendor for BigBlueButton, who keeps our system up 100% and provides excellent customer service. We also use LTI to link to various tools (such as links to textbook publishers).

I highly recommend Sakai, and would be glad to discuss our experience with others. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This is a community of users, so like any open source community, you need time, money and resources available to make updates. Luckily, the money and resources usually do appear when we need them!

The Test & Quizzes tool has been updated (simplified settings), but it will become more streamlined as money/resources become available.

Of the tools, the Forums/Topic tool is clunky; I'd like to see a replacement. Since different people created different tools-some don't work like the others-this is one of those tools.

I'd like to see the Blog integrated with the Gradebook, and I like how simple it is..but there are two blog tools and we have to pick one to support.

The community has looked at a replacement for the wiki tool, but nothing open-source has really caught our eye.

Lessons in Sakai 11+ has been seriously upgraded-now you can create columns, sections, colored backgrounds, and is streamlined, so it looks excellent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SAKAI is continually expanding its functionality. The potential for the product expands as the developers refine the tools. For example, the gradebook feature is more sophisticated than when the product first launched. Also, more textbook publishers are creating products that work directly with SAKAI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are less customization options for the "home page" of each class. It would be exciting to be able to establish a "brand image" for my classes so that students who take more than one class become familiar with the set up of the class more easily. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's the best LMS tool available.

It has great set of tools like lessons, assignments, announcments, test and quizzes, forums, chat and many.

Supports integration with basic lti, big blue button, kaltura etc.

It got beautiful community who are always there to help you out.

A true open source tool, You can voice your opinion on anything(feature, bug) in the community.

Help content is very well documented.

You can rely on this lms because it is used by lot of top universities in the world(https://sakaiproject.org/community).

Lot of customization can be achieved simply by setting properties . Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

First time Installation is tricky.

Documentation for developers is not so great so mostly you have to rely on the community.

Lessons tool should be improved to create class room kind of environment.

Developers need to know many technologies to customize the software.

Attendance tool is missing which should be provided. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have gone through the all the tools which are exist in Sakai LMS, and each tool has its own priority to reduce the problem of Mentor and Mentee. I have taken the classed to the students by using even other LMS tools but which are not user friendly as Sakai tools. I like mostly Lesson tool and Test and Quizzes most and these two are important to any domain who transfer the education one among to other. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As an end user as soon as he comes to Sakai pages, giving guidelines how to use the courses, but few screens are confusing to the end user. Need to provide end user to give his/her own names for the courses. This is bit confusing to the end user. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sakai is an open source LMS, which means that there are many, many people who care about its quality and functionality -- people who work in higher education. The people who build Sakai are the people who use Sakai. (Contrast this with commercial LMS where the system is build by programmers in a back room somewhere for profit.)

That said, Sakai has a wonderful open architecture that is pedagogically neutral. Instructional designers and instructors can place whatever tools are appropriate for their teaching, and, more importantly, for their students' learning, into a course. The tool pallet for Sakai is extensive, with tools for communication, administration, collaboration, and more. Sakai excels most of all, perhaps, in its ability to build collaborative working and learning models. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In an open source world, one has to get used to a rather broad range of opinions about what the system should look like. There may be less of a cohesive design strategy. That said, however, I've seen an awful lot of commercial products (and some open source ones as well) that have just as much, even more, lack of cohesiveness. Consider a certain commercial product that seems to enjoy acquiring (and suing) competitive products and then "integrating" them into its architecture. The design strategy of acquisition and stitching together ends up with more of a patchwork quilt than a consistent design. Sakai certainly does NOT have that problem. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.